Motorway in Portugal
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Spanning rivers, plains and hillsides, the thousands of kilometres of motorway Portugal has built over the past three decades are visible evidence of how a poor, peripheral country has sought to move itself closer to the core of Europe.

But long stretches of these roads have been left almost deserted by motorists who can no longer afford to pay the tolls charged. To help keep Portugal’s €78bn bailout on track, the government has been forced to introduce charges on more than 900km of roads where there was previously none, triggering angry protests, increasing business costs and confusing tourists.

“Motorway traffic has fallen sharply over the past two years,” says José Monteiro Limão, editor of Transportes em Revista, a specialist transport magazine. “This reflects both a drastic contraction in spending and the introduction of new tolls on roads that were previously free of charge.”

Gonçalo Torres, whose work as an events organiser requires frequent motorway driving, says the 220km journey from Castelo Branco to Lisbon costs him more in toll charges than it does in fuel.

Many family budgets no longer stretch to motorway travel, he says. Driving the 300km from Lisbon to the northern capital Porto costs €22 in tolls for cars and about €36 in fuel. The 279km journey from Lisbon to the Algarve costs €22 in tolls and about €34 in petrol.

With the standard tolls for trucks almost double that for cars, export businesses and transport companies have been particularly hard hit, forcing many to make longer journeys using secondary roads, says Mr Monteiro Limão. The government has reduced tolls for night-time truckers by 25 per cent but businesses are pressing for further cuts.

The tolls have contributed to a fall in traffic. According to Inrix, a traffic information company, overall road congestion has fallen more in Portugal than in any other European country, by 50 per cent in 2012 and 68 per cent in the first three months of this year. In 2012, car sales fell to a 27-year low.

As well as a symptom of recession, analysts see Portugal’s empty stretches of motorway as evidence of ill-advised public spending that contributed to the country’s debt crisis.

Many motorways were financed through public-private partnerships, contracts in which Portugal’s international lenders consider governments assumed too great a share of the risk. These PPPs, used to shift payment on to future taxpayers, are now being renegotiated with the aim of clawing back savings of €7bn for the state.

“If we have spent too much on motorways, we have to focus on making them as efficient as possible to reap their full benefit,” says António Ramalho, chairman of Estradas de Portugal, the national highways company

EU funding also contributed to the glut of motorways. Since 1986, Portugal has received €96bn in EU structural and cohesion funds to help it catch up with core Europe – to which Lisbon has contributed a further €86bn. A big share of this – about 25 per cent of regional development funds – has been invested in roads.

In that time, Portugal has extended its motorway network from about 300km to 3,000km, reaching almost double the average motorway density in the EU. It now has four times more kilometres of motorway per inhabitant than Britain and 60 per cent more than Germany.

This has helped cut average journey times between Lisbon and provincial cities and the border with Spain by more than 40 per cent. But experts argue that this proliferation of tarmac was unnecessary and has brought few benefits.

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“We could have spent a quarter of what we invested and built a perfectly adequate motorway system that would have better served people and the economy,” says a senior Portuguese motorway professional who asks not to be named.

In some cases, motorways run parallel within a few kilometres of each other for long sections. Government has also invested disproportionate amounts in roads to the detriment of railways, says Mr Monteiro Limão, building 2.5km of motorway for every 1km of track.

“Who gains from all this spending?” asks Mr Torres, looking around an almost empty motorway café. “It’s always the same banks, the same construction companies, the same investment funds,” he says, expressing a widely held belief that motorists and communities have not been the biggest beneficiaries of Portugal’s motorway expansion.

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